danincanada
Registered User
- Feb 11, 2008
- 2,809
- 354
It is a defensive first system, stop trying to say it isn't and go have a conversation with some professional coaches, please.
It's designed to keep puck possession as much as possible and control the game. To keep the puck off the oppositions sticks, limiting their ability to attack and produce scoring chances.
When the oppositions best players are on the ice, it's designed to make them waste their whole shift chasing the puck. Then when you have more favourable personnel on the ice, you can push the play.
This is and was Bowman's playbook in a nutshell, his bread and butter. Matching lines, lines that had specific jobs against specific opposition lines limiting any advantages and attacking when you had the advantage.
In it's simplest definition, it's keep away with a purpose or purposes.
I don't understand what your beef is with this. Lidstrom fit this system like a glove because he controlled the play and was extremely patient and poised so he didn't take risks or make mistakes. The results speak for themself; 900 regular season wins in his career, which is apparently the most of any skater all-time, 4 Stanley Cups, 6 trips to the Finals, never misssed the playoffs. What exactly is the problem?
Lidstrom had the hockey IQ to pull this off and was a coaches dream. In your opinion he didn't take enough risks or carry the puck himself enough though? What's that old adage? "The puck moves faster than any skater."
The most perplexing of all is that moving the puck like this exactly what Bowman praised Harvey for - a player I've never seen you criticize this way:
"It's hard to compare them in a way because they played in vastly different eras. I coached Harvey in St. Louis before Nick Lidstrom was born," Bowman told ESPN.com last week. "But the two most common denominators between those two was that it was very seldom either one got caught up ice. Their passing skills were so terrific. Their first pass.
"If you charted a hockey game and you wrote down where the puck went every time those two touched it, it usually went on another teammate's stick unless they were killing a penalty. Their positioning and that sixth sense to be aware of what's going on ... they made a lot of partners looked pretty good."
http://espn.go.com/blog/nhl/post/_/id/2508/scotty-bowman-on-those-lidstrom-harvey-comparisons